Last week, congressional Republicans narrowly approved a White House rescissions package, clawing back roughly $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund local public television and radio stations around the country, and roughly $8 billion from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The measure — a breathtaking example of GOP lawmakers ceding their authority to the White House at the president’s insistence — was soon after signed into law by Donald Trump, at which point House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared on Fox News and declared, “The Republican Party is the party of fiscal responsibility, and we are demonstrating that day after day.”
That the Louisiana Republican could deliver such a line with a straight face was rather unsettling. Indeed, just one day after Johnson made the comment, the public received fresh evidence about just how little the GOP actually cares about “fiscal responsibility.” NBC News reported:
President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ which he signed into law this month, will add $3.4 trillion to the U.S. national debt over the next decade, according to a report the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published Monday. The report found that the law, which Republicans passed along party lines, will also ‘increase by 10 million the number of people without health insurance’ by 2034.
According to the CBO’s revised score, the $3.4 trillion figure does not include additional interest costs. With those additional figures factored in, the Republicans’ megabill is poised to add over $4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
What was Johnson saying about the Republican Party being “the party of fiscal responsibility”?
This isn’t an especially new phenomenon. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and his party racked up some of the largest budget deficits in modern times. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and his party eliminate the budget deficit altogether and started paying off the debt. Then George W. Bush took office, at which point Republicans put two wars, two tax cuts, Medicare expansion and a Wall Street bailout on the national credit card — and made no effort to pay for any of it. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney declared that “deficits don’t matter,” and a GOP senator famously said it was “standard practice not to pay for things” in the Bush era.
Barack Obama managed to shrink the deficit by $1 trillion, before Trump added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt in his first term — most of it before the Covid crisis — before the deficit shrank again during Joe Biden’s term.
Put another way, the fight over “the party of fiscal responsibility” label is over before it starts.
That said, the GOP’s megabill is a game-changer, to the extent that it makes matters worse in new and dramatic ways. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the far-right domestic policy package doesn’t just add trillions of dollars to the debt, it also reduces the amount of tax revenue the country collects for decades. “Such a shortfall could begin a seismic shift in the nation’s fiscal trajectory and raise the risk of a debt crisis,” the Times added.
Whether the House speaker understands this or not, fiscal responsibility is one of his party’s biggest weaknesses, no matter how eager he is to pretend otherwise.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
